1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to refrigeration systems and more particularly to systems and methods for monitoring the status, condition, performance and energy consumption.
2. Description of Related Art
Poor maintenance, misconfiguration or improper installation can result in wasted energy, decreased reliability and increased operational costs of refrigeration systems. Current maintenance practices entail frequent and costly inspections by trained technicians, or in rare instances, the installation of costly instrumentation to directly monitor the mechanical compressors and related components of the refrigeration system. Refrigeration equipment used in biomedical research, for example, typically goes through preventive maintenance inspections once every six months. Trained technicians perform manual inspections gathering performance data from each freezer to determine whether the refrigeration system requires additional maintenance. These inspections are labor intensive, costly and inefficient because the entire population of refrigeration systems must be inspected even though only a small percentage might require repair or maintenance.
One type of refrigeration system, Ultra Low Temperature (ULT) Freezers capable of maintaining storage temperatures of −80° C., are used extensively by research organizations and Life Science companies to store research specimens. The unexpected failure of a ULT Freezer or any refrigerated storage system in a life science application can result in the catastrophic loss of high-value, mission critical research specimens. To avoid loss, companies often adopt a policy calling for replacement of refrigeration systems after five years of service for lack of an affordable option to detect the onset of problems or failure.
Over time, all equipment suffers a loss of operating efficiency due to mechanical degradation, deferred maintenance or simple misconfiguration. According to US Government data, Life Science research and manufacturing facilities consume 2× to 8× more energy than commercial office buildings and “plug loads”, energy consumed by equipment plugged into walls, consumes an estimated 20% to 45% of total energy used. For lack of an affordable and easy to deploy monitoring solution, these assets are “hidden” sources of wasted energy—energy that is 100% recoverable if affordable tools existed to manage them.